The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1887-07-02
TOWsoNTowN Nd, SATURDAY, JULY 2 1887

place with the other ones, and to the
best of his ability answer the question
ing of the expanding minds and souls
of children.
To do this apparently simple thing
requires many rare qualities, the first of
which is patience, and the next is a
sense of responsibility. Every walk,
every ride, or visit to the museum, or
other place, can be made the medium
for fuller and truer understanding of
the subject and each other than could be
obtained any other way, and it is always
pleasure to watch a father with his
children in any such place.
How quickly the stranger understands
the true condition of their home life
and love, and how it warns the heart to
see the father trying, with his tongue,
to keep pace with the quick intelli-
gences and absorbing desire to learn
something new.
The idea is not by any means new
one that parents should make home so
pleasant that children should never wish
TO 6ad pleasures elsewhere, but it
should be adopted by every father and
mother in the world. Neither alone
can make home happy.
There must be harmony between pa-
rents laHs aHa and a4Rls Pfodudes P9t feeling Of
unity among all, which conduces large
ly to making children happy at home.
How many boys have run away from
unkind and unsympathetic fathers, who
ruled their sons and daughters with
rod of iron, history cannot tell and
how many girls have been led to make
hasty ill-advised marriages to escape an
uncongenial home, none knows.
There is no need for all this. Love
is the factor, the pivot and the grand
central motive of home life, and where
love is there is little else required.
Children revel in the expressed love
of their parents, and the mother whose
caresses are never withheld, no matter
how big the boy or girl who claims
them, is the mother who keeps her
children longest. The father who loves
his children and is not afraid or asham-
ed to show it is the father whose chill
dren love and honor him all the days
of their lives.
How many stern and rigid ministers
who think they must not spare the rod,
and who try with their blinded eyes to
make their children live by their IRON
clad rule, have driven their sons and
daughters out into sin and shame by their
puritanical laws? How many poor and
ignorant parents have brought up chill
dren that were an honor to the country?
We all know this. Is it not because
those first named are hedged in SO by
infexible, narrow rules, and these adj
ministered in strict justice without love,
or at least love exhibited in tenderness,
and that at last the impulsive youth
broke the narrow bondage and struggled
blindly for larger life?
The lives of the poor and ignorant
may still have been so filled with tender
love and gentle caresses that the hearts
of the children never felt the want of
anything better or beyond, and under
the eyes of their poor, loving but ignor-
ant parents may grow up men and wo-
men whose lives are lessons.
One family SO poor that books were
rare blessing used to sit around a work
table evenings and make patchwork
quilts, men, women and children of both
sexes working, each to the best of his
or her ability, all talking and happy,
cheerful and gay. Once in awhile one
would have book or paper and read
aloud to the others. Before bed time
an apple apiece, or some other slight
refreshment, was eaten with such con-
tent and pleasure that it was a rare
pleasure to see them, and while boys
and girls worked hard, they preferred
their own home at all times to any out
side temptation.
Weather people turn their little
ones over to nurses, and never let them
come to sit with them evenings around
the fire or work table where there is a
unity of interest, and the children are
thus divided from their parents in their
youth, and parents must not be aston
ished that they have no influence over
them when they grow Older. for they
lose that sweet and beautiful depend
ence upon parents supreme knowledge
and think themselves fully capable OF
deciding for themselves in all matters.
If men and women do not want the
care and responsibility of their chill
dren's souls, they should never marry.
If they do, they must love each other,
and love their children, then will those
children arise and call them blessed and
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